WESTBROOK PLANTATION. Westbrook Plantation was just south of Hearne in southwestern Robertson County. It was named for Titus Carr Westbrook, whose mother, Sidney Westbrook, married Lewis Whitfield Carr in 1854 in Mississippi. In 1858 Carr came to Texas, where he began buying and developing land in the Brazos River bottoms about eight miles south of Hearne. There were only about sixty acres in cultivation in the section where he settled. Sometime afterward he bought the Mitchell plantation, later called the Carr and Beckham plantation. When Carr died in 1911, he was the owner of over 2,700 acres, most of which were in cultivation. After achieving the rank of colonel in the Confederate army, Westbrook returned to farm a large plantation, possibly his stepfather's, near what became the town of Hearne. Westbrook became one of the most successful planters in Central Texas and provided financial assistance to the building of the Hearne and Brazos Valley Railway, which dubbed the engine for its locomotive the "T. C. Westbrook." After he died in 1893, his widow built a house that occupies an entire block in Hearne. In the early 1900s plantations in the area began breaking up, and presumably Westbrook met the same fate. In 1988 there were only a few scattered dwellings at the plantation site.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: J. W. Baker, History of Robertson County, Texas (Franklin, Texas: Robertson County Historical Survey Committee, 1970). Lawrence Ward St. Clair, History of Robertson County (M.A. thesis, University of Texas, 1931).